


Paved With Good Intentions

by Azzandra



Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Dreen-Gift, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2019-02-05
Packaged: 2019-08-19 08:58:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16531457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/pseuds/Azzandra
Summary: Clemethius took on a new minion not knowing she'd turn out to be a Dreen-Gift. But oh, he'll figure out a use for her yet.





	1. An Introduction

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Gift of the Dreen](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16448273) by [phoenixyfriend](https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenixyfriend/pseuds/phoenixyfriend). 



> Hey-ho, here we go, another Dreen-Gift fic! Who am I to resist a self-insert fic?
> 
> But for those not in the loop:
> 
>  
> 
> _"Dreen-Gift: a term for supposed psychics that pop out throughout history, who know things, whether past, present, or future, that they have no way of knowing._
> 
> _They are so called because they are "delivered" by Dreen to where they are needed, and if they go a step too far and try to give more information than the Dreen would like, one shows up to scare them back into silence._
> 
> _The reality is that Dreen-gifts are people from other dimensions, including ours, who have read parts of the story before._
> 
> _There's a world where the primary story of Europa is that of Andronicus and Euphrosynia, with barely a footnote for Agatha's existence, but a delightfully torrid romance inside._
> 
> _There's a world where Ht'Rok-din was the main villain in a video game that, as it turned out, one could not successfully win by defeating him, only by keeping him from going past the immediate countryside surrounding Mechanicsburg._
> 
> _There's a world where the first jagers were the enemy supersoldiers in a highly-acclaimed Image comic._
> 
> _And so on."_ \--[The Gift of the Dreen](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16448273/chapters/38515805) by phoenixyfriend

The siege on Penticot's castle lasted a few hours, and at the end, when the town was plundered and Clemethius picked his way through Penticot's lab, he discovered most of the man's research was offensively unimaginative.

"Hyu vant anyting from hiz lab before ve burn it, Mazter?" one Jäger asked, brandishing a half-empty bottle of plum brandy. It smelled like the good stuff, useful for both celebration and accelerant.

"Nothing here is even worth the effort it would take to carry it away," Clemethius sighed.

"Hokay. Vell, vot hyu vant to do vit de live meat?"

"Live meat?" Clemethius turned to where the Jäger was pointing. Penticot's research didn't tend towards the biological, but sure enough, a cage occupied some dusty corner of his lab, and the Jägers pulled off the tarp covering it to reveal its contents.

A girl poked her face through the bars, dirt streaked across it, and her dark hair, chopped at the shoulder, was stringy with grease.

"Oh, thank goodness you're here, I thought I was stuck with Piticot forever," she said.

"Penticot," Clemethius corrected automatically, then focused his attention more closely on her. The girl's voice was rough with disuse and her accent odd. Not from around those parts, though Clemethius couldn't quite pin a region. South-east of Mechanicsburg, maybe? 

Her eyes, large and almost feverish, roamed across the room, taking in the coterie of Jägers and minions poking around. 

"Are you one of his experiments?" Clemethius asked.

She snorts loudly at the suggestion. No, he supposed she wouldn't be. Despite being tattered and dirty, she was not nursing any wounds that he could see, or displaying any interesting modifications.

"Just a prisoner, then," Clemethius concluded, and turned away.

"Hey! Hey, wait!" the girl called out, her hand shooting out through the bars to flutter, anxiously trying to catch his attention. 

Clemethius decided to indulge her for a moment, curious what she wanted. She clearly didn't understand who she was speaking with.

"Do you-- hire?" she asked haltingly.

"Do... I hire?" Clemethius' brows knit together in confusion.

"Yeah, minions. Uh... people to work for you? I have time, now that Piticot's--" She made an expressive cutting gesture across her throat. Oh, now there was no way she'd seen how Clemethius had dispatched her former captor, but that was quite accurate to the motion which had been involved.

Clemethius stared for a long moment, then turned to look at the nearest Jäger, who shrugged.

Did she really not know who she was talking to? Were the Jägers not a hint? They were usually a hint.

Clemethius considered both possibilities--that she might not know, or that she might and just be that crazy--and then a smile started spreading across his face.

"Sure," he said, more amused than he'd been about anything that day. "Why not?"

He ordered her broken out of the cage, and had a better look at her once she'd shuffled out of the cage, hunched in on herself as she blinked against the light.

"What's your name?" Clemethius asked.

"Uh..." Her eyes fixed on a point in the distance for a few moments, before she finally produced, "Lia."

"No, no, please, take a moment more to think about it," Clemethius snorted. If she was going to give him a fake name, she might as well really work on it.

"Lia's fine," the girl shrugged. "S'good."

 

* * *

 

By linear transdimensional chronology, and from the perspective of Lia, a scant two weeks ago had seen her sitting at her computer, legs pulled up so she hunched over her knees like a gargoyle to type at her keyboard, fingers curled like chicken-claws as she pecked at buttons rapidly.

Despite being stricken by a lifelong case of baby-face that would have shopkeepers addressing her as 'doll' across two universes, she was in fact edging into her thirties by the time the Dreen found her. With a confidence born of obsessive interest, she took a long drink through a straw from the jug of soda on her desk, and then set upon the keyboard again to churn out a two thousand word essay on the significance of a minor recurring element in her favorite serialized media of the moment.

Then she saved the essay to drafts, and posted to her tumblr a three-line joke on the subject instead.

Satisfied with her work, she took another long drink of soda and nodded to herself.

Then she scrolled down her dash, past a photoset of Norwegian Forest Cats, and stopping on the first fandom post she came across.

After taking a moment to stretch her fingers, she clicked reblog and started writing furiously.

'Honestly, idk if it even bothers me that they went the route they did. Y'all know what a sucker I am for worldbuilding, and there's only so many gags you can do about 'haha, look at these evil mad scientists doing wacky evil shit!' before it gets old. I don't think it was necessarily a mistake to do story arcs and introduce recurring characters, because at the time it felt fresh, and I think the funniest thing was when this random throw-away goodguy we only knew as the Storm King suddenly has a name and a personality. You need that balance, you know? Story arcs gave the gags a lot more weight. Kinda like how you need a straight man in comedy to made everything funnier by contrast.

But yeah, the Andy/Syn romance arc suuucked.'

She then proceeded to write several hundred words on the flaws and virtues of the discussed comic, Somewhere in the Carpathians, and the characters therein.

 

* * *

 

"Hoy, pack dis vun up vit de rest ov de loot!" the Jäger called out to the wagon drivers, and then playfully smacked Lia's shoulder. It wasn't painful as such, but she still nearly toppled over, surprised by the contact.

The packing crew stopped after hoisting some rolled up rugs to eye the girl.

"Meat for the Fleshyards?" one asked. 

"New minion for de Mazter," the Jäger said.

"I'm not very good quality meat," Lia added.

The Jäger grinned at her, and suddenly all those rows of jagged, interlocking teeth gleaming at her seemed a lot bigger up close than stylized in a comic. She was two parts scared and one part envious. Those were some damn good teeth.

"Yeah, toss her in," the driver grunted, gesturing vaguely to the back of the wagon.

"Or you could just place me in gently," Lia suggested, going around to climb in the back.

The booty wagon was very large, however, and Lia was not notably tall, so she dithered for a moment, trying to figure out how to climb in, especially with how packed the wagon was. Eventually growing impatient, the Jäger picked her by the back of the shirt and hoisted her inside like she was a rug.

"Try not to brek anyting," the Jäger advised, before the doors were unceremoniously shut in Lia's face, and she was left in the dark, perched on an overturned armchair in the dark, with only pinholes between the wooden slats to offer her light.

"This is fine," Lia said, with optimism she didn't particularly feel.


	2. Monsters of Mechanicsburg

Lia's new life started from the day she was hauled into Mechanicsburg, and kicked off the back of a wagon out in the middle of a street.

She was still blinking blearily against the sudden light, squinting, when someone took her elbow.

"Move it, dollink," the Jäger instructed, pulling her away as minions converged on the wagon to unload it.

"Oh, thanks," she said, letting herself be pushed and pulled in whichever direction.

"Hyu iz new?" the Jäger asked. At her nod, he turned to shout, "Hoy, von Mekkhan! Got hyu sum new meat!"

"I wish everyone would stop talking about me in food terms," she muttered. "Before someone actually tries to take a bite out of me."

"Hy promize it vould be chust a nibble," the Jäger replied, grinning his full set of mouth daggers at her.

She snickered in return, which was not the reaction usually garnered from out-of-towners.

"Hy am Grigori."

"I'm, uh, Lia."

"Goot choice," Grigori replied dryly.

Lia didn't get to respond before a shrewd-faced man in a Russian kaftan strode up to them, his critical gaze sweeping over Lia, and then settling on Grigori.

"And what do we have here?" the seneschal asked.

"Not for eatink," Grigori replied.

"I came to, um, work for the Heterodyne?" Lia offered.

The seneschal looked her up and down again, more appraising than dismissive, and apparently grew resigned to the notion. He gestured for her to follow.

 

* * *

 

"What is it that you can do?" the seneschal demanded, walking briskly enough that Lia's own short legs were pumping hard to follow. Von Mekkhan walked through the Castle gates, and then took a flight of stairs, two at a time as Lia scurried after him, breathing hard and pressing a hand to her side.

"I can do what I'm told?" Lia offered between exhausted huffs.

The seneschal stopped on the stairs, turning around as his kaftan fluttered impressively. Lia stopped, startled as she looked up at him. Already at a disadvantage when it came to height, the extra stairs made the seneschal loom over her.

"Show me your hands," he said suddenly, and after a moment of hesitation, she presented both her hands to him.

He brushed his own rough fingers against Lia's soft palms, and his mouth twisted in something like displeasure.

"So you don't know how to do anything," von Mekkhan said.

"Hey, now--"

"Can you read?" he snapped the next question, and Lia's protests, already on the tip of her tongue, stuttered out as a confirmation instead.

Looking entirely skeptical about that, von Mekkhan reached into his kaftan and took out a slim volume. He opened to a page and gave it to Lia.

"Uh, actually, I can't read Cyrillic," she offered sheepishly.

"What _can_ you read, then?"

"The... Latin alphabet?"

"Do you know Latin?"

"Uh... I'm familiar with it... but by quantity, I'm going to go with... no..."

Von Mekkhan's brows lowered with every answer Lia gave, so that now his eyes peered at her from their cavernous eye-sockets like a bear judging if it was even worth the effort to come out to eat her.

"I believe we are done here," von Mekkhan said, turning around in a sweep of his kaftan and proceeding up the stairs. "Castle?"

There was a cackle from the walls, and two stairs came apart to yawn open like a mouth, gulping Lia up.

"Shall I let you know when this one breaks?" the Castle asked, something like a leer in its voice.

"Tell me if she doesn't," von Mekkhan replied, proceeding up the stairs. "That would be far more astounding."

 

* * *

 

The next time von Mekkhan saw Lia--an outcome he did not expect and therefore did not prepare for--she was loitering in the hallway outside his study.

He took a moment to think exasperated thoughts at the Castle for not warning him she'd clawed her way out of the death traps. And looking none the worse for wear at that.

Well, fair was fair. He didn't know how she'd managed it, but since she proved more resilient than expected, she could have the job.

"You will have to learn to read," he said sternly.

"I _can_ read," she muttered quietly. But at his harsh look, she quelled. A good quality in a minion.

"You will learn to read and assist the Master in his experiments," the seneschal instructed. "You'll get a room in the Castle until we sort you out properly. And a... change of clothing." He tried not to scrunch his nose at her filthy rags. Some kind of sturdy trousers that may have once been blue, and a shirt that was probably wool but had clearly seen better days. No idea what to make of her shoes, so he didn't even try. Who knew what blighted corner of the Wasteland this one had crawled out from.

Ah, well. Mechanicsburg could make good use of the Master's strays. They always did.

 

* * *

 

"Vot iz dot about, ennyvay? Vhy izn't hyu more scared ov Jägerkin?" Grigori asked her once, as he passed through the lab one night and found her up late feeding the man-eating bats.

She scooped a ladle of pig's blood and poured it slowly for the bats to lick it off the cage bars, as she'd been instructed, and watched in fascination as the construct's black tongue flicked out to lap at the blood rapidly.

"Um, I don't know. I'll be more scared next time," she replied distractedly. The bats were chittering happily.

"Hy dun need hyu pity," Grigori pouted.

"Uh huh. Hand me some more blood."

He picked up the bucket to pass it to her, and the bats inside the cage began rattling against the cage screeching as they anticipated the meal.

"Hey! No! Calm down, dinner's coming!" Lia said, waving the ladle. 

But unwilling to wait, one of the bats hooked the ladle with the spur on its wing, and pulled hard enough to wrench it and Lia's arm closer. And, sensing the opportunity for a truly fresh meal, the bat then squeezed its head through the bars to sink its teeth into Lia's forearm.

Grigori twitched into action immediately, dropping the bucket to clatter to the ground and spill blood across the floor. But he'd seen the kind of chunks the Master's man-eating bats could take out of people, and Lia wouldn't have been the first minion to get done in by a careless feeding.

Except--inexplicably--Lia was fine. To the bat's and to Grigori's astonishment, the bat's fangs didn't actually go into Lia's arm so much as through her like she was little more corporeal than a ghost. Her arm flickered like reality denying itself, and then she pulled back, bloodless except for what was now soaking her boots.

"Vot der dumboozle?!" Grigori yelled.

"Aw, urgh, gross," Lia scrunched her nose at the mess of blood. "Now I'm going to have to clean that." She looked up at Grigori. "Um, sorry, I have to get this."

"Iz no problem," Grigori said, placing a hand on her shoulder to give her the most serious look he could muster. "In fact, hyu know dot conversation ve vere just haffing?"

"...Yeah?"

"Forget Hy effer asked dot schtupid qvestion."

 

 


	3. Recipe For Boiling The Frog

The steps went something like this:

**One:**

"Oh, oops. Uh... Oh no..." Lia gave a despondent look to the beaker she'd just knocked over, cringing as it immediately began smoking and eating through the table, and through her boots, and then through her floor. 

But where Clemethius would have expected most minions to do the one-leg jig all the way to the chemical shower down the hall, Lia only looked mildly put out, like she'd spilled a glass of water and wasn't sure how to mop it up. As the leather of her boot burned and curled back to reveal flesh, her foot flickered in and out of existence like an after-image burnt into the retinas overlapping proper vision, and Clemethius stared.

"Uh! Oops!" Lia repeated with a lot more feeling as she noticed Clemethius' attention, and booked it.

Well.

**Two:**

"I'd like to test a hypothesis," Clemethius said by way of warning, because the next thing Lia knew, the floor went out from under her feet, and she dropped straight into a pit of spikes.

When she finally climbed out and arrived back in the lab, looking winded, disheveled and disgruntled, Clemethius had a smile on her face. He turned a page in the book he was studying, putting a finger to a particular paragraph.

"Dreen-Gift," he said, his voice like silk with all of the subdued glee in it. 

She stiffened in response, eyes roaming, a cornered mouse for all that she couldn't truly be hurt.

"Huh? What? Huh?" she stammered with a nervous laugh, but even that was confirmation enough.

**Three:**

In a lunchroom with free wifi, she once painstakingly wrote out on her phone the remark: 'It's funnier that we don't really know why Garitz just reappears every time after we clearly see him killed. Does he get zapped back to life? Is there a room somewhere with a gazillion vat-grown Garitz clones? Is he like a hella good escape artist? WE DON'T KNOW. Finding out would kill the joke.'

In a tower in Castle Heterodyne, she heard the snaps and squelches as Clemethius puts Garitz back together again after his latest careless fall into a deathtrap took him apart.

"Hand me the bonesaw," Clemethius demanded, and Lia picked it out and handed it without looking too closely at his work.

She heard, though. Snap. Crunch. Squelch. The Heterodyne always rewarded loyalty.

**Four:**

The lightning was blinding. The crack of thunder that followed was as loud as a god's fury.

"Good! Good! Just in time!" Clemethius screamed, his beard standing on end with static, his eyes wild and bulging. His smile was terrible as he held up the lightning rod.

Every time she heard the thunder, Lia startled and her heart galloped like a spooked horse. Every time Clemethius screamed defiance to the heavens, it did the same.

And her heart ran away without her.

**Five:**

If Clemethius watched close enough, he could see the internal flinch of recognition in Lia's face; the way her mind would stutter over some piece of information he dispensed, and then she'd rear up attentively, as if ready to say something but too scared to actually do so.

It was never something he expected to garner a reaction. Plunder and knowledge and secrets that he collected did not seem to hold the same interest.

But a remark to a servant, or the Castle bringing something to attention, and Lia would fumble her way through transparent attempts at manipulation. Sometimes it was to save him some headache, or avert some danger. Once she moved his chair in the lab right in front of a window, and Clemethius watched the chair curiously to understand its purpose, until a hero came crashing through the window, and stumbled over it, and crashed face-first into the floor.

**Six:**

After the first time she saw what happened to heroes in Mechanicsburg, the behavior changed. No helpful chairs, this time. A few bindings tied more loosely, a door left unlocked.

But to Clemethius, this was not a betrayal. This was more data.

**Seven:**

If Clemethius asked, point blank, then about six times out of seven she'd try to weasel out of giving any definite answer. The remaining one out of seven times, she asked him--or told him--what to do. It became an amusing game of bluff and counter-bluff, as she pendulated wildly between brazen lies and genuine pleas, as she figured out that he would alternate between taking her advice or acting its opposite.

**Eight:**

Nobody knew Euphrosynia had been in the hero's escape path until they burst into the alley, Clemethius with his acid-spitter in hand, prepared to reduce everyone to puddles if need be.

But Euphrosynia, all of six years of age, clung to Lia's pant-leg, wide-eyed and amazed, as Lia pummeled the man with a shovel.

"She! Is! Only! A! Child!" Lia punctuated each word with a slap of the shovel. She would have gotten more immediate results if she simply placed the edge against the man's throat and pushed down with all her weight. Good way to pop off the head, even in a living subject; Clemethius knew. But she was also the most squeamish of the minions, and Clemethius couldn't help but be amused by the spectacle.

**Nine:**

Euphrosynia sat perched on the edge of the table in Clemethius' lab, and swung her legs back and forth, in good spirits.

"Daddy, I like this one," she said, pointing to Lia.

"Oh, you've got a good eye, Synnie," Clemethius said, grinning. "We'll have to keep this one close."

**Ten:**

Nine times out of ten, the Jägerdraught killed any who took it.

But how curious, then, to stack those odds against the gift of invulnerability that the Dreen had granted. Would it allow Lia to be killed, if that was her lot? Would it have some third, heretofore unsuspected effect on her?

The experiment was worth the risk, he decided.


	4. Any Predictions Vague Enough Are Indistinguishable From Meteorology

When the spear was thrust through Lia's back and came out the other side, Lia shouted, but it was not so much from pain as it was annoyance that the basket she was carrying was almost skewered. She raised it up and out of the way, twisting around to glare at her attackers. 

The spear, phased through Lia's torso, was pulled back to leave her completely unharmed in its wake, but Lia was still annoyed.

"Will you stop doing that!" she demanded of Euphrosynia and Bludtharst, who, being eight and six years old respectively, reacted to this by giggling.

"I told you, I told you!" Euphrosynia crooned victoriously as her brother hopped up and down in excitement.

"Do it again!" Bludtharst said.

"No!" Lia shot back, annoyed. She had the basket held in both hands over her head, so she balanced on one foot and used the other for a shooing gesture. She looked predictably ridiculous. "Off with you! Go raid the kitchens, I smelled pastries earlier."

"Okay, but we're coming to stab you again later," Euphrosynia informed Lia, very matter-of-factly.

"No!" Lia shouted again, exasperated, but the children already scurried off, leaving the spear to fall to the ground. They would probably return from the kitchens with a knife, or a poker, or whatever stabbing thing they found most amusing.

When Lia finally arrived to Clemethious' laboratory, bearing the basket of heads that she'd been sent to fetch from the Fleshyards, Clemethious cast her a flat look.

"I said fresh heads," he drawled, and if he'd had a wristwatch, he would have probably obnoxiously tapped it to point out how long he'd been waiting for the delivery.

"Have a word with your devilspawn, then," Lia replied. "They nearly skewered the entire basket right out of my hands."

"Ah, is Euphrosynia still practicing her stabbing on you?" Clemethious asked, growing a bit--not softer, exactly, but more lenient at the mention of his children.

"I would like to point out," Lia said slowly, "that practicing their stabbing on me is hardly preparing them for the real thing."

"Hm. Good point," Clemethious agreed. "I shall have to procure some prisoners for the children to play with."

"That's not what I-- oh, never mind," Lia mumbled, putting the basket of heads down on the worktable and pulling off the cloth that covered it.

Clemethious set to sorting through the heads while Lia retreated a distance away, trying not to gag.

 

* * *

 

Bludtharst, aged ten, and Euphrosynia, a more sophisticated twelve, sat on the roof of a shed eating raspberries as they watched their father tinker with a device that looked a bit like a cannon. Instead of cannonballs, however, the projectile for this particular device was located in a large vat, currently billowing green smoke.

Euphrosynia felt Bludtharst elbow her and then point to where a couple of the minions were stirring the vat. Garitz and Lia were standing on elevated platforms on opposing ends of the great vat, stirring with long poles the noxious liquid therein. They both wore rudimentary masks, with long beaks and black glass goggles, making them look like funny bird people ready to pluck out someone's eyes.

"Bet I could push Lia in," Euphrosynia said, as the mean little idea popped into her head.

"Bet I could push Garitz in," Bludtharst said, not wanting to be outmatched.

"That would melt him down to nothing," Euphrosynia sniffed. "Poppa is going to be very angry if there's nothing left of Garitz to bring back."

Bludtharst sputtered as Euphrosynia shoved the bowl of raspberries in his hands, and then hopped down from the shed roof on top of a barrel, from there clambering down to the ground.

Lia would be furious, of course, like she was after falling into one of the Castle's deathtraps, but it wasn't like she'd be hurt by this, so it was all in good fun. And Euphrosynia liked practicing how to be sneaky. Momma said she was good at it. She ranged around the other outbuildings, darting from hiding place to hiding place until she was all the way around the enclosed courtyard and right behind Lia.

She'd just looked one way and the other, ready to run up and give Lia a push--the minion was so petite, that one good shove from a twelve-year-old was more than enough to send her tumbling--but just as Euphrosynia inched out into the open, a cheerful voice called out.

"Hoy, leetle miztress! Come to help hyu poppa?"

Euphrosynia cringed, and whipped around to look to the Jäger propped against a gate post, smoking his pipe. She'd not noticed Vuloc because he was just in the shadow of a gate, hard to see from where she'd been watching from the roof of the shed, and impossible to see if one was sneaking along the other side of the rows of dingy shacks.

"Oh, no, I just--" she started.

But Clemethious had noticed Euphrosynia by then, and waved her over.

"Synnie, come look, I think I've nearly solved it!" her father shouted cheerfully, and in a tone that brooked no refusal. 

Euphrosynia resigned herself to her filial duty, and ran over to receive the expected mechanical lecture from her father. Bludtharst chortled in amusement as he continued to gorge himself with raspberries on the roof of the shed. He'd not broken through yet, and so he managed to evade such demands on his time.

She thought nothing of the incident until later, when darkness had already fallen and her father had dismissed her for dinner. Euphrosynia passed by the Jäger's smoking spot, and before rounding a corner, she heard Lia speaking.

"Told you she'd try it," Lia was saying, and just as Euphrosynia came in sight, Lia handed a fat satchel of whatever plant he was smoking to Vuloc. "There's your payment."

Euphrosynia jumped back out of sight, retreating from the light of the lamp hanging over the gate, though she was sure Vuloc had spotted her regardless.

'But how did she _know_?' the girl thought indignantly, and then felt foolish as she recalled. 'Dreen-Gift!'

Well. That changed the game, then, see if it didn't, Euphrosynia decided.

 

* * *

 

Bludtharst was twelve when he managed to wheedle his father into allowing him to go out on his first raid, and even then, it was only under the supervision of General Khrizhan and an entire contingent of Jägers, on top of the number Bludtharst himself had selected for the task.

"I'm not even going past the mountains," Bludtharst complained bitterly. "Just a tiny foray west."

"Good, then the added troops shouldn't be much of a bother," Clemethious had replied, before going back to work.

He was getting long in the tooth, Clemethious, and though he doted on his children and wanted them safe, he also wanted to perhaps get some rest in his old age, and pass on the business of ruling onto one of them. Bludtharst was showing an encouraging amount of initiative, and the signs of his impending breakthrough were getting more pronounced by the day.

Euphrosynia, though older, did not show as much inclination towards raiding, but she displayed plenty of initiative in her own way.

The afternoon after Bludtharst left, she showed up in Clemethious' lab looking downcast and bored. In fact she moped around so artistically, sighing with the dramatic flair of a thousand thespians, that Clemethious--who'd initially decided on waiting her out--broke first.

"What's got you down, Synnie?" he asked.

"Nothing, Poppa," she replied sweetly, before letting her fake cheer drop away into hesitation. "Well... I suppose something, actually."

"Tell me, dear," Clemethious said.

"It's just that, well, Bludtharst got that army to go out raiding," she said.

"Yes? If you want to go raiding--"

"No, it's not that," Euphrosynia said, her nose scrunching at the thought. The day she was going to leave the comfort of a laboratory to go stomping around in the mud was long in the waiting, indeed. "But, since Bludtharst got an army, maaaaybe I could get a chief minion?"

"You're thinking of someone specific?" Clemethious asked, wondering where this was going. If it was only a matter of more minions, Euphrosynia would have gone to the seneschal and gotten as many assigned to her as she pleased. Perhaps she wanted one of Clemethious' favorites, then; his chief minion Priscila, or maybe Garitz.

"I want Lia," Euphrosynia said.

Ah, there it was.

"My dear," Clemethious started gently, "you understand she's--"

"A Dreen-Gift! Yes, Poppa, I'm aware," Euphrosynia said. "But you said so yourself, you haven't gotten anything useful out of her for years, and you might never will. Don't you think it would be a good test of my abilities if I gave it a try?"

"Synnie, I don't think there's anything useful to be gotten out of her to begin with," Clemethious said, his brows pulling together in thought. "She's a curiosity, nothing else."

"Well, I'm curious," Euphrosynia said with finality, and crossed her arms.

Clemethious rubbed his chin in thought, tugging on the bristles of his short beard as he considered.

When Lia walked into the lab later, she was surprised by Euphrosynia pointing to her and effusively declaring "You're mine now!", before launching into an impressive bout of cackling.

 

* * *

 

When Euphrosynia was sixteen, she finally deigned to go on her first raid, and only because she had heard good things about the library of a moderately distant neighbor. Since she had concluded that the neighbor in question was going to rudely refuse her if she should ask to borrow the volumes she needed, she decided it was necessary to go out and punish him for it.

"But it didn't happen," Lia pointed out, as she was packing some of Euphrosynia's tools.

"What a droll complaint from a Dreen-Gift," Euphrosynia replied. "Would you not agree there is, in fact, a timeline in which such a thing did happen?"

Lia's lips pressed together tightly, and she looked off to a point in the distance, like she always did when she clammed up. Euphrosynia resisted the urge to follow her gaze, because there was nothing there. Whatever the minion saw, it was purely in her own strange little head.

In truth, Euphrosynia was beginning to see the appeal of going off on raids, and was even excited about this one. Bludtharst always returned from his with such interesting toys, and she couldn't deny it had made her curious.

Lia, on the other hand, was insufferably put out by the notion. She tried to hide her sour mood, but she also, constantly, made low-key discouraging remarks, trying to steer Euphrosynia away from the notion. It was one of Lia's little Dreen-Gift fits, as Clemethious called it; unable to utter prophecy, Lia would instead attempt to change course without a paddle. Whether she was successful in her endeavors, they usually had to judge by Lia's expression. They had yet to crack what blueprint Lia was working from, or what she was working towards.

Euphrosynia was terribly bent on being there the day they did figure it out, though.

As chief minion, Lia could not avoid getting dragged along for the raid as well, though she was even more averse to leaving Mechanicsburg than Euphrosynia was. They were joined by the human raiding regulars, as well as all the Jägers that Clemethious could hoist upon them in his fatherly fretting, yet despite it all, Lia maintained an air of tension throughout.

Euphrosynia tried not to give her much mind; it was a lovely spring day, sunny with a gentle breeze rustling through the trees, and they were making good time. But Lia's head swung from side to side as she rode in the carriage, going  from the window on one side to the other, clearly watching for someone. It set Euphrosynia on edge, and it made Lia look like nervous cattle. Euphrosynia was just about to say something when the interruption came.

A spherical object shot straight through the window, leaving a thumb-sized circular hole behind, and Lia being already on alert--or at least exceedingly twitchy--she kicked the door open, grabbing Euphrosynia's arm to pull her out of the seat and shove her unceremoniously out.

Euphrosynia fell into the arms of a waiting Jäger, and there was a flash behind her, inside the carriage. Lia emerged like a vengeful fury, haloed by black smoke, and body-checked someone standing right next to to the carriage. For a split second, Euphrosynia thought it was someone of their party, but no--when Lia grabbed onto his cloak and pulled, the man underneath was clearly a stranger, and dressed in rough militia garb, as for a town's defending forces.

He pulled his cloak out of Lia's grasp, and somehow Euphrosynia lost sight of him, even though she knew, intellectually, he'd been standing right there. He confirmed his continued presence when a dagger shot out to get Lia between the ribs.

The cloaks were Sparkwork! Euphrosynia felt a shiver of delight at the realization. Around her, Jägers were engaging an entire militia patrol, with some difficulty because of how the cloaks made them unnoticeable.

The militiaman currently attemting to stab Lia was running into the problem of not seemingly being able to kill her, as his dagger phased through her, but his attempts were visibly irritating Lia.

Like she would often do when Bludtharst and Euphrosynia played this game, Lia grabbed the attacker's dagger out of his hand.

"I'm keeping this!" Lia declared, in the same stern tone she'd use on children.

"No, get his cloak!" Euphrosynia called out.

Lia scowled, but responded by hurling herself bodily onto the militiaman. Though she was not terribly large, the entire weight of a person slamming into him was still enough to send the militiaman to the ground. The ensuing struggle was devoid of both dignity or martial prowess. Lia was relying on her invulnerability to see her through it, and the militiaman was now screaming about ghosts.

The struggle raged on for a few more minutes, as the Heterodyne forces grew wise to the trick and mugged the militiamen of their specialized goggles to see through the cloaks.

Euphrosynia stood out of it, of course, since she found this kind of thing quite beneath her, but after it was over, she had them gather all the cloaks and goggles, packing them into a trunk so that she would study them once she returned home.

When they were settled back into the carriage--Euphrosynia looking none the worse for wear, and Lia looking disheveled and flushed--all seemed well.

"Was it supposed to go like that?" Euphrosynia asked.

Lia opened her mouth to answer, then frowned thoughtfully, before making a so-so gesture with her hand and shrugging.

"Fascinating," Euphrosynia muttered. "And now what?"

"Go back home?" Lia suggested hopefully.

"No."

"It was worth a try," she muttered, slumping back into her seat.

But Euphrosynia still found the minion amusing, the way one did a familiar puzzle that always eluded solving.

 

* * *

 

Euphrosynia was twenty-eight when the Battle of Six Skies was lost, and the Heterodynes were finally forced into peace talks with the Storm King.

Purple storm clouds still hung ominously over the battlefield, which had been stripped of corpses both by the Heterodynes, and the opposing forces, now that they knew what happened to the dead they left behind. Euphrosynia pondered the churned earth and upended warmachines with clinical detachment, but underneath it all was a roiling frustration.

Bludtharst had had his chance to win this war, and slammed his head into a bloody stalemate instead. Decisive defeats had been had before, and many a Heterodyne had come back home to lick their wounds in their wake, so there would have been no great shame in that. And a decisive victory would have been a nice feather in Bludtharst's cap. But a stalemate was a horrid state of affairs to be stuck in, and it gave Euphrosynia a bitter taste in her mouth, as if she'd been chewing at cage bars. 

As she stood on the walls of Mechanicsburg and looked out onto the field, she was flanked by Jenka on one side, and Lia on the other. Jenka looked out onto the field as well, her pleasant features screwed into a very unpleasant expression.

Lia sat on one of the battlements, facing to Euphrosynia's back, and kicking her heels. Her expression was even more dour than Jenka's. In the decade and a half since becoming Euhprosynia's minion, she had displayed a scrappiness and reckless disregard for her own well-being in defense of her Heterodynes that had had Clemethious offer Lia the Jägerdraught. Now she was an even green shade, clawed and fanged and still reckless, though she had lost the Dreen-Gift invulnerability, as Euphrosynia herself had learned after patching Lia up one too many times.

She had not lost the Dreen-Gift knowledge, though, Euphrosynia didn't think. She watched Lia closely, like one would watch a weathervane which turned to the vagaries of the timestream instead of the wind, and she still thought there was some path that could be taken to see the Heterodynes through this. Being absorbed into the Storm King's empire was a repulsive notion, and Euphrosynia couldn't believe Lia's purpose as Dreen-Gift was to ensure such a thing happened.

After a time, Euphrosynia was joined on her quiet contemplation by Clemethious and Bludtharst, their own Jäger guards not far behind. Having their Heterodynes clustered on the wall like this was clearly making them all nervous.

Bludtharst, as always, looked most thunderous.

"We have to give them an answer about the peace talks," he said, displeased. "I wish they'd have sent a flesh and blood messenger, I'd have had an answer for them."

The Storm King likely knew precisely what Bludtharst would have done to a human messenger, and so they had sent one of Van Rijn's more rudimentary machines to deliver it instead. Much less satisfying to send that kind of messenger back in a box, so it only made Bludtharst fume more.

"We should accept the peace talks," Euphrosynia said in sudden inspiration, and watched from the corner of her eye as Lia's head turned, and her mouth opened in concern. No words came, except from Bludtharst, who sputtered noisily in response. "Poppa," Euphrosynia continued, "you believe I could find some way to use the talks, don't you?"

Clemethious' gaze was carefully keeping away from Lia, though Euphrosynia knew by the smile he pinched back that he'd noticed the Dreen-Gift's reaction. He tilted his head as if considering.

"I'm sure you have your ways, Synnie," Clemethious said mildly.

Lia stiffened even further, her concern unspoken, yet so loud she was like a buzzing live wire.

"But! Poppa!" Bludtharst said, looking between Euphrosynia and Clemethious wildly. "We can't! You can't just let her--"

"I'm sorry, Bludtharst," Clemethious said, his tone taking on an edge, "but tell me again how the last battle went?"

Bludtharst sputtered himself into silence, his shoulders coming up defensively.

"Do as you will, Synnie," Clemethious said, all but giving his blessing to the endeavor. Euphrosynia squealed in delight and hugged her father in thanks.

Bludtharst and Lia exchanged miserable glances over the top of Euphrosynia's head, but the decision was already made, and what would come was beyond their abilities to stop.


End file.
